Afterword
Live long enough, and you’re bound to say: What. The. Hell. Was I thinking? Hopefully, your actions don’t affect as many people as terribly as mine have; hopefully, your conscience doesn’t carry the weight mine does.
What I’ve learned over the decades spent in cell blocks has helped me make the best of the terrible hand I dealt myself. There are three lessons that I cobbled together from reading, which has always been my safe harbor, and then treated over and over in the laboratory of my life.
What you choose to focus on matters, and will inevitably influence your choices, for good and for ill.
Accept the things you cannot change, while working tirelessly to change the things you just can’t accept.
To return to the question of what the hell one was thinking, the same holds true collectively of the criminal justice system. Just think of how outlandishly cruel the prisons of 100 years ago look to us today. This is us and it will be us. During my time, I have learned a thing or two about a thing or two. Given the givens, better to just take my word for it. Any good that happens behind these walls is usually despite the system, not because of it.
Night after night during the Vietnam war, A.J. Muste stood in front of the White House holding a candle. A reporter interviews him in the rain one night: “Do you really think you’re going to change the politics of this country by standing out here alone at night with a candle?” To which Muste replied, “Oh, I don’t do this to change the country. I do this so the country won’t change me.” The work I’ve undertaken over the years has been done so I can eventually be released a better person, and so that the system doesn’t change me for the worst. In the darkness, one can be the light.